Make Money Out Of Quantum Computing
One way to make money out of quantum computing is through advertising. In this market, big companies and universities would pay thousands of bucks to quantum computing companies to display ads in quantum web crawls — as many as a hundred of them per day. At that rate, you could make the $1 billion in revenue it takes to run a quantum Internet advertising firm.
Or you could make money selling quantum computing companies and quantum web crawls. You know, the big ones that want quantum computing. You could bid on these sorts of ad buys because you understand how quantum computing works, and it will give you a bigger return on your investment than you would if you were just an ordinary seller.
Now, let’s say that quantum computers become big and everyone wants to do research and development on them. This market works the opposite way: If there’s a big enough research group working on quantum computing, other companies and universities might want to join that group. They would pay you, the quantum programmer, tens of thousands of dollars a time to write programs for quantum computers and give them to the research groups, and the more research groups that were running quantum computers, the more money you would make.
One thing that quantum computers are good at is crunching huge amounts of numbers very quickly. That means that once someone builds a quantum computer you can pay tens of thousands of dollars to run programs on it and have a billion times more computing power than any traditional computer can be expected to have. This is the reason why you might find very high rates of growth within the quantum computer market when it is just a handful of major research organizations — when there are so many potential buyers.
In addition to the ad market, quantum computing companies are also finding that they can make money by selling their own products, like quantum computers themselves.
The bug would’ve appeared in Gmail’s search bar when someone typed a single word that might be related to a previously mentioned search, such as “buy a car”. The result was that you wouldn’t receive a lot of spam, but you might get unwanted messages from ads trying to sell you things, such as cars and insurance, among other things.
As many people suspected before, the problem was caused by Google’s autocomplete algorithm, which, at times, has used an ad-related guess, even when there is no data for that term coming from the search box.
According to Google’s blog, the bug has been “removed from the product in a fix” and was not malicious behavior.
Google has been struggling to balance between what people expect and what they can actually use, after it rolled out an improved autocomplete function in 2012 which, while being a huge improvement, did have a glitch — and since then, it’s had much more time and resources on search to make sure there’s a much deeper understanding of words and the data they’re associated with.
For example, the biggest company currently building quantum computers and selling quantum computing-enhancing applications is IBM. In the quantum computing space, IBM is the first, and many expect it to be the biggest, company, in part because they have a huge database and user base. That base of users is what makes IBM the “winner.” But IBM also sells quantum computing applications themselves.
If there is any group of people that knows a lot about quantum computation, it is IBM. That’s why they have been pushing for years for quantum computing to become available to developers and research organizations. In fact, the “Powered By Quantum” logo is IBM’s own design, and it looks pretty dang amazing — but it’s not available for everyone.
I spoke to some IBM engineers who were happy to talk about IBM doing quantum computing. As far as their enthusiasm for quantum computing, one of them is John Rogers, a physicist working on quantum computing at IBM who made his name doing research on quantum teleportation technology.
“It’s really exciting to see this technology take off,” John Rogers said. “What you can do with quantum computing is amazing.”
Now, John Rogers isn’t the only one. Many of the most vocal investors in quantum computing, like Google, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, and the University of Maryland, are all working to build quantum computing into their products.
That means that soon, you may be able to do cool things with quantum computers, like superimposing a digital painting onto a real-world painting, or maybe building an image that looks like a photograph of your hand holding a gun. In this particular market, I think Amazon might have the upper hand given their huge cloud computing business — but there are also other companies that might have the chance to do something neat when quantum computing is ready to become available.
As for the physical future, Rogers says that the “quantum revolution is going to go at a pace of exponential speed.” He hopes that our computers will soon be able to simulate all the elements of the atom and even simulate an entire new element in the universe, a nucleus, which he predicts will be discovered in 2017. “When [the nucleus] is out there,” he predicts, we’ll realize that the laws of physics don’t match up with the way we thought in the 1990s about those fundamental particles. “They’ll just have to be adjusted.”
Rogers says it’s all part of the accelerating change, which makes sense when you consider quantum physics’ most fundamental rule: There is no “before” and “after.” Our universe, if you like.
